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It’s not decided yet, but the odds look good for a new WA senate election, to clear things up after the AEC’s recount discovered 1375 missing votes. (I gather from Antony Green that the AEC actually knows what these votes were, or at least how they were originally counted, but they can’t be used in the recount unless they are actually recounted.)

There’s a delightful arcane complexity to the logic behind the counts themselves. It’s a question of the Shooters and Fishers vs the Australian Christians. Neither of them have a hope of being elected on their numbers, but (essentially by pure luck) that two-way contest happens to decide between four other parties. The original count had the Shooters winning against the Christians by 14 votes, setting up Labor and Palmer United for a win against the Greens and the Sports Party. The recount (with 1375 votes missing) turned this around into a 12 vote relative victory for the Christians, leading to a actual Greens/Sports victory.

It all seems a bit like a series of football matches in which, due to complex points calculations, the fate of your team actually depends on a game they’re not even playing. However, in general, organisers of sporting competitions don’t suddenly decide to reverse the result of a match played eight weeks ago between two of the bottom teams, leading to the current set of finals contenders suddenly being rounded up mid-game and replaced by a bunch written off three weeks ago.

Possibly the most counter-intuitive thing is this: if just a few Labor supporters magically had foreknowledge of this complex turn of events, they might have realised that a vote for the Shooters would do more to help Labor than a vote for Labor itself. The same would be true of Palmer United and the Greens, though Greens supporters would have had to vote for the Christians, of all people.

A new election will wipe the slate clean, in a way, but Labor and the Coalition have begun to play an interesting game there. According to the Coalition’s Warren Truss — our new Deputy Prime Minister:

I think if there is a new election … it needs to happen as quickly as possible so there is as little distance between the atmosphere and the issues that decided the election in September and what will be on the table at the time that a new WA poll is held …

It is important that the investigation [into the missing 1375 votes] is given an opportunity to run its course.

Once that investigation’s given an opportunity to run its course, we’ll have to make a decision about the way we can best be confident that the voice of every Western Australian has been heard.

Spot the difference. The Coalition wants to get it done ASAP, but Labor wants to make sure all the details are known, which of course may delay things a bit. According to Antony Green, the election rerun must occur “by the latest in early May”. The Coalition would probably be concerned — and Labor might be somewhat enthusiastic — about a shift in public opinion between now and then.

In the disputed recount, the Liberals won 3 seats, while Labor, the Greens and the Sports parties won one each. One seat out of six is a pretty poor showing for Labor, and it looks like it was only 0.14 quotas away from a second in its own right. In an election rerun, depending on the evolution of public opinion, Labor and the Greens could do quite a lot better.

If Labor/Greens come away with three seats together, they would have 36 senate seats in total. This could come at the expense of either the Sports Party or the Liberals. Either way, the bargaining power of the other Senate cross-benchers would be significantly increased, and Abbott’s options for getting things through the Senate would be diminished.

If things go particularly disastrously for the Coalition, and Labor/Greens come away with four seats in WA, and so 37 senators overall, they could combine with Nick Xenophon to block legislation such as the carbon tax repeal. (Senate votes require a majority of more than half. There are 76 senators, so the government needs 39 of them to pass legislation, and the opposition needs 38 to block it.)

The Coalition presumably knows this, and will probably spend the election campaign1 whinging about Labor’s carbon tax and the threat to civilisation and indeed to the very fabric of reality that it poses. But Labor can itself spend the campaign pointing out that Abbott isn’t big on public transport funding, GST revenue, or whatever other issues float into view at the time. And everyone else can talk about the election in a changed context — we’re not deciding which party actually governs, but rather how best to hold the government to account, which of course presupposes a particular answer.

And so the game is this: the longer that it takes to hold a new WA senate election, the more likely it is that Abbott’s “honeymoon” period will wind down in the mean time, and voters will start to assign responsibility to him and the Coalition for any failings of government. This is presumably what Truss is hinting at when he talks about the “atmosphere and the issues”. He wants to avoid an election rerun being used by voters to pass judgment on the Coalition, because, conceptually, this would still be part of the election that brought them to power in the first place.

I wonder if the WA public will see it like that. In any case, WA politics may soon — if just briefly — become very important to the rest of Australia.